E-Paper
AU pens MoU with INFLIBNET for availing ‘Shodh-Chakra’ benefits
The initiative will provide digital workspace to the research scholars and also help their supervisors monitor the entire work
Allahabad University (AU) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an inter-university centre of University Grants Commission (UGC), for availing the benefits of ‘Shodh-Chakra’.
Shodh-Chakra is an initiative of the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) centre under UGC to help the teachers and research scholars in academic activities during their research.
It provides research support to the academic community by amplifying the latest tools for conducting research and educating researchers in conducting quality research work. Shodh-Chakra provides a unique space to the research scholars, supervisors and university to manage the lifecycle of a research work. It works as a digital workspace wherein researchers can collect, store, organise and cite their research work. It helps researchers to create their profile and manage their preferences, informed AU officials.
The system will generate login credentials to researchers, supervisors and university. Further, any researcher can login into system and avail the facilities of Shodh-Chakra, they explained.
Research scholars and research supervisors of AU are the main stakeholders of Shodh-Chakra. Researchers can search, organise and manage literature from millions of scholarly articles from Shodhganga, Google Scholar, IRINS, Crossref and other database. Shodh-Chakra provides interactive platform between guide and researcher.
It also has a unique feature to mark the favourite resource so that it can be referred in future while preparing the manuscript. Researchers can gather information of upcoming seminars/workshops and conferences in all the fields across the country on participatory approach through Shodh-Chakra.
The system will save the details of all the three stakeholders including research scholar, teachers or University.
“The system is designed in such a way that it will automatically send notification to the users in terms of seminars or workshops being held in any part of country in their area of research so that he or she can enroll for the same if interested,” explained Librarian of AU’s Central Library, BK Singh.
Central Library of AU is the nodal centre to implement this project, he added.
Researchers can store, collect, organise and manage scholarly resources in a personalised resource space known as My Library. It stores information of scholarship/fellowship received by researchers and other administrative details of the researchers. Reference management tool (Zotero) is integrated with a portal that will help researchers to manage resources. It also facilitates researchers to annotate the resources. The research scholar will also have the space of 2 GB (on cloud computing) using which the scholar can save the downloaded academic work, if needed.
“The best part of the system is that the supervisor of any research scholar can monitor his or her work in an online mode and also resolve the issue, if any through the portal,” said Singh.
Moreover, the University too will have a separate login ID and the official, designated with the responsibility, can keep a tab on the progress of the research being done by any of the student enrolled at AU.
